The Wizardry series in the U.S. vs. Japan post-1980s shows a difference in gaming cultures. The first five original American Wizardry games are supposed to be mostly the same thing with some slight updates. V was old-fashioned when it came out in 1988.

Bard’s Tale, a “Wizardry Clone” in 1985

I can’t get the images I wanted to link, just scroll through this page, it has good screenshots.

Wizardry V on Apple II in 1988 I don’t mostly don’t care if you read the text, I’m just posting the link for the pictures, but read the very beginning where he points out that the two shots are from two different games.

Look at this one too.

Then the U.S. got three Wizardry games that actually tried to change with the times, and Japan got something like 20 original Japanese Wizardry games that were basically just more versions of 1980s Wizardry. Most of them didn’t ever get U.S. releases. This 2006 game got released here a few years ago:

I dunno what’s up with those hit points, I assume they’re hacked or something. I’ll see when I get further into the game. Anyway, that monster looks nice but isn’t animated.

As for Wizardry’s innovations, from the blog I linked to above:

https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/03/wizardry-won-seriously.html

It is, as far as I can tell, the first CRPG to feature:

Multiple characters in a party*
Experience points and levels the way we think of them in CRPGs today
Multiple foes at the same time
A complex magic system (on both the sending and the receiving ends!)
Separate spells for mages and priests
Tactical combat
Multiple types of items–weapons, armor, helms, accessories–that you can find and wield.
Items that must be identified
Cursed items
A full list of D&D-style races and classes
Classes restricted based on ability scores
Alignments (I could be wrong about this)
The ability to change classes (which I didn’t do)

*note (from Joe, not from that blog) - I read recently about a multi-player mainframe game where one person controls the movement and everyone controls what their characters do in battle. Mainframe games weren’t commercial releases though.
I might have read about it on this same blog, maybe that was after Wizardry.

It was also the first game that came in a box and not a plastic bag!

I don’t know if you knew this, but in alot of those old CRPGs you could carry your characters over between games in the same series, and sometimes even between games in different series made by different developers. Wizardry started this, but the very first versions of Wizardry II had the horrible feature that required any newly created characters to start at level 1, which the game was scaled for around level 12/13, so if you weren’t porting characters from the original game then it was just unplayable. Also, the original game only let you export characters that you’d beaten the game with.

Chrono Trigger had you visiting a character’s grave in one time period so as to pour a soda pop on the aforementioned grave, but I bet it was booze in Japan.

Yes, I’m sure it was booze. lol

Lucifer’s Hammer is an enduringly famous book and has lots of fans. Alot of people have said that it’s good but it’s the literary equivalent of a summer blockbuster, which is probably true and probably fine with me as long as I read it with that expectation. I have this sitting unread on my shelf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall
If I like it’s I’ll probably eventually read Lucifer’s Hammer.

From those authors, I have read a couple novels:

Larry Niven - Ringworld: This is one of the earlier “big dumb object” books, where humans explore a mysterious celestial object. Ringworld is like a , but it’s just a Ring, which the book argues is better. The ideas are big and important but on a story/character level it’s pretty simple and pulpy. Lots of people still like and talk about it but it gets alot of shit hurled at it for sexism & lack of depth outside of the scientific concepts. It basically is what people say it is, good and bad. I liked it well enough, your mileage may vary.
It won the Hugo. I haven’t read the other nominees, but Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero and Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass are also sitting on my shelf.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - The Mote In God’s Eye: This one is a great, IMHO. The prose is nothing special, but it’s a page turner with a great story and cool aliens. It’s a much smarter and more complex book than Ringworld. I think Niven and Pournell were both Atheists, but they portrayed the humans non-judgementally as a conservative Christian society, I think just so they could have no women in the military and only have to have one woman (a reporter, I think? I remember that she wasn’t able to depart in time when an emergency mission came up) in the expedition including two spaceships with large crews. So that was a weird decision. But the rest of the story kicks ass. I think I tried to get Trung to read this, but he won’t even read Dune.

I haven’t read Pournelle’s non-collaborative writing but he was supposed to be an even bigger right-wing crank than Niven and ended his career publishing through a nice libertarian press.

I’ve read a bunch of Niven’s short stories, including Hugo Winners Neutron Star and Inconstant Moon. The other story that seems notable is The Soft Weapon, which he adapted into a Star Trek: The Animated Series episode where he swapped the original characters/races for Star Trek characters/races. It’s the only episode of that series where anyone dies and the only episode without Kirk.